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Hill Farmstead’s Amarillo

As I said before, the thing about Vermont is that Heady abounds. It’s not like in Chicago, where you got to get lucky to find Zombie Dust even at its brewery. Nor is it like SoCal, where yeah you got tons of good hoptions (get it? Get what I, an adult, just wrote right there?) but if you want Younger you got to get to brewery six hours before it opens and then say a magic password and then kiss this weird gross stuffed raccoon thing they got hanging up above the taproom bar.

In Vermont, Heady is surprisingly easy to find. And since it’s fucking Heady, you drink a lot of it. Which is grand. But the bad side is that other, less incredibly extreme beers begin to taste like Coors.

Case in point: all of the HF pales we had (aside from Citra, but we had that with fresh pallets). Even glorious Abner tasted kinda tame.

And so I’m just now getting around to this swig-top growler of Amarillo, which struck me as the least impressive during our small tasting session. What I’ll say is that HF does a damn fine job of really balancing their single hop beers. Meaning, they adjust the malt profile along with the hops, instead of just treating barley like an empty stage upon which hops frollick. That Hill dude is a malt wizard, and a yeast wizard.

And, accordingly, this Amarillo has a creamier, more ester-less base than the Citra. This accentuates the pleasant, floral nodes of the Amarillo while managing to diminish the potentially extreme nodes of cat pee and raw alpha acid that sometimes shine through. There’s some light fruitiness in there, too. But mostly flowers.